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Suspended Senator Mike Duffy leaves the court house after the first day of his trial on Tuesday in Ottawa.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail

Mike Duffy is getting ready to testify in his own defence at his fraud and bribery trial, giving himself a podium to attack the Conservative government while opening himself up to further questions about his living and travel expenses while in the Senate.

Defence lawyers typically decide late into a trial whether they will ask their clients to testify – and expose them to a vigorous cross-examination by the Crown. But Mr. Duffy's lawyer, Donald Bayne, has telegraphed his intentions to bring the senator and former TV journalist in front of Justice Charles Vaillancourt after the Crown has made its case. Given the schedule of the trial, which will sit for a total of 41 days, Mr. Duffy would likely take the stand in June.

Mr. Duffy has proven to be a potent foe of the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party, whom he blames for a fall from grace that started with media reports over his expenses in late 2012. Mr. Bayne has already depicted senior officials in Mr. Harper's office as co-conspirators in a damage-control strategy to force Mr. Duffy to admit to mistakes on his expense claims and repay $90,000 to taxpayers in 2013.

Mr. Duffy ultimately repaid the money, but only after Mr. Harper's then-chief of staff Nigel Wright agreed to give him the money from his own personal funds.

Once Mr. Duffy testifies, the Crown will be able to cross-examine him on key elements of the 31 charges that he faces: allegations that the PEI senator illegally claimed thousands of dollars to live in his long-time home in Ottawa and make personal trips to visit his children in British Columbia, and that he sought a bribe from Mr. Wright.

In the first two days of the trial, Mr. Bayne has twice made references to Mr. Duffy's coming testimony, once in relation to $100,000 in renovations to his PEI cottage and another time in relation to documents that he received from Senate administration. "Senator Duffy will, at the appropriate time, clearly give evidence about having received [the documents] and what it meant to him," Mr. Bayne said on Wednesday.

The issue of Mr. Duffy's bungalow in Ottawa and his cottage in Cavendish, PEI, were central as Justice Vaillancourt heard the Crown's first witness, recently retired Senate law clerk Mark Audcent.

The Crown is alleging Mr. Duffy was an Ottawa resident and did not meet the qualifications to represent Prince Edward Island in the Senate. As a result, Mr. Duffy is facing charges of fraud in relation to $82,000 in living allowances that he obtained by declaring that his home in Ottawa was his "secondary residence."

According to Crown prosecutor Mark Holmes, Mr. Duffy lived, voted, paid his taxes and received his health services in Ontario, and shouldn't have designated his PEI cottage as his "primary residence."

In his testimony, Mr. Audcent said there was not a single criteria that had to be met when the senator determined his primary residence. Offering a series of examples, however, he said senators would be expected to have a driver's licence, a health card, family ties and social relations in the province that they represented in the Senate. "There is no indicator that is a guaranteed 'if you have this, you are a resident, if you don't have it, you are not,'" Mr. Audcent said. "Residence is a question of fact, and so you gather these indicators together and look at the whole picture."

Under cross-examination, Mr. Audcent acknowledged the criteria that he had laid out were part of his "personal list" and that there was no clear definition in Senate rules about a senator's primary or secondary residence. Mr. Audcent added that Senate officials made an "effort to avoid that terminology" when they wrote the Senate administrative rules.

Mr. Audcent also acknowledged that Mr. Duffy received "incorrect and confusing" advice from Senate officials about the rules surrounding residency qualifications after his appointment in 2008.

Mr. Duffy, a long-time parliamentary reporter for CBC and CTV before he became a senator, has come under fire for claiming expenses for being on "travel status" in Ottawa, even though the city had been his home for decades. However, Mr. Bayne is arguing that as soon as he became a senator from PEI, and faced a constitutional obligation to be a resident of the province, Mr. Duffy's primary residence had to be his Cavendish cottage.

He got Mr. Audcent to acknowledge that there was nothing in the Senate rules stating that a senator had to spend a minimum numbers of days a year in his or her primary residence. Mr. Bayne added that the fact that Mr. Duffy had spent $100,000 to upgrade his cottage constituted a clear "indicator of a commitment to that property."

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